[keiferski]

As someone else said, HN is not a good place to ask this question. There is a constant irrational hostility to anything crypto-related here.

It's been awhile since I've followed blockchain tech closely, but with the increasing power of AI tools and the potential for deepfakes, I can see a use case for blockchain in verifying that a photograph is real and not AI-generated.

I also think blockchain is an ideal technology for a world that no longer trusts central authorities. That world seems...increasingly likely to me, so in some sense blockchain's real use case may not have arrived yet. This is not unique or rare; many times in history, a technology's "real use" is not apparent until decades or centuries after its invention. People declaring something dead or useless a decade after its invention are frankly ignorant of how the world actually works.

[joshstrange]

I can’t imagine why HN thinks crypto related stuff is bullshit /s

So your suggestion for how blockchain is useful is something that doesn’t even make sense? How does “blockchain” solve deepfakes/AI-generated images? This is why HN is hostile to this. Blockchain is a cool idea, no doubt, but the applications of it are almost solely crypto (aka scams) or ideas that make no sense and require burning a ton of power for dubious results. How does a blockchain verify a picture is not AI-generated? You’re going to put a picture hash in a chain? Ok, what stops me from putting an AI generated hash in a chain?

So many of these ideas around blockchain love the idea of “trustless” but fall flat on their face when you have to trust what’s being put into it in the first place. Yes, we all can share a glorified excel document of hashes but who decides what goes into that sheet? And what stops someone with more computing power from deciding even if it’s wrong?

[loveparade]

> I can’t imagine why HN thinks crypto related stuff is bullshit /s

Because the vast majority of people doesn't understand anything about it. And most don't want to because they've already made up their mind. You just have to look at any thread about crypto and it's full of misinformation and idiotic takes from people who obviously have no idea what they're talking about. E.g. threads on some kind of centralized exchange scam that has with comments like "I thought crypto was decentralized" or "I thought blockchain solved this" - Everyone likes to have an opinion on crypto even when they're completely uninformed. Of course it doesn't help that 99% of crypto projects are scams, but that doesn't make the underlying protocol a scam.

AI doesn't really have that problem. You don't need to understand anything about how models work to use an LLM. AI also doesn't have payments built-in at the protocol layer, so it's much harder to scam people with AI. But crypto is fundamentally different. It doesn't have easy-to-understand apps that make you more productive like an LLM does. It's highly political and ideological and operates on a layer (banking) that most people have never had exposure to and don't think about in their daily lives.

> burning a ton of power for dubious results

You realize that pretty much all crypto projects are built on top of Ethereum or Ethereum L2s which barely burn any electricity, right? There are (nearly) no projects built on Bitcoin because well, you can't really build anything on Bitcoin.

[api]

The last part is a valid point, but it’s also part of what I don’t like about crypto.

You have this very technical protocol that lets you do banking without banks and theoretically without central banks. I always thought that was cool. But then you release it. A few aficionados use it, but most people can’t because it’s as you say highly technical and opinionated.

So along come people who try to do the usual tech thing of bringing it to the masses. They don’t care one bit about the libertarian political stuff. They don’t truly care how the technology really works. They’re looking to build a product.

So they do, and they release it, and it eventually finds product market fit: gambling and scamming. Note that this is also what most non-finance peolle do with direct access to stock markets and fiat currency markets too. It’s not something inherent to crypto. People love to gamble and scam.

Unfortunately this application and the number of people and amount of money involved in it totally swamps and dwarfs the original idealistic libertarian types. Crypto becomes about scams and gambling. This is how you get to 99% of all projects being scams or casinos.

It’s similar to how all of social media became about surveillance and propaganda supercharged by interfaces designed for addiction.

Now people hate crypto for the same reason they hate social media.

It’s tempting to wring your hands and just blame the unwashed masses for corrupting the fire you brought down the mountain, and that’s not entirely wrong. Yet I for one am not content with just doing that and being a curmudgeon.

Instead I like to think about how technologies can be designed from the ground up to incentivize positive uses.

Crypto has a lot of characteristics for example that incentivize or at least make it very attractive for stupid and destructive uses. The irreversible transactions are great for scams, and the highly deflationary economics are great for speculative casinos.

[loveparade]

I totally agree with this take. I like to describe Ethereum as a "platform for scams" because its by far biggest use case are scams. Scams are just so easy when you have money built-in at the base layer. Just imagine a world where decades ago SMTP had launched with built-in payments. Leaving aside that adoption would've been impossible during that time because people are scared of putting their credit card info online, it likely would've resulted in SMTP to fail and being used almost exclusively for scams since it would've been so easy to extract money from people via email. Crypto has that problem.

That doesn't make SMTP (or Ethereum) itself a scam. But it's also undeniable that a platform for scams doesn't have a positive impact on the world.

[joshstrange]

> Because the vast majority of people doesn't understand anything about it. And most don't want to because they've already made up their mind. You just have to look at any thread about crypto and it's full of misinformation and idiotic takes from people who obviously have no idea what they're talking about. E.g. threads on some kind of centralized exchange scam that has with comments like "I thought crypto was decentralized"

Ok but I do understand it, I also understand how cool the concept of the blockchain is _but_ real application of the blockchain outside of crypto is practically non-existent or could be better served by not using a blockchain.

As for snarky comments about “I thought crypto was decentralized”. Yes it’s snarky but it’s a totally valid criticism. You don’t get to extol the virtues of something if 99% of people don’t make use of it because it’s entirely too difficult to do for the layman. “If you don’t own your keys, you don’t own your coins”, cool but if it takes a career in CS to protect and backup your keys it’s not going to catch on.

Why do people put their (fiat) money in a bank instead of schlepping around all their cash or storing it themselves? Convenience, and crypto didn’t really address or fix any of that. In fact, in a number of ways, crypto is worse in things like transaction times. And don’t talk to me about lightning or similar concepts which require some level of centralization or trust outside of the base crypto guarantees. Centralized crypto was inevitable and people arguing differently don’t live in reality. That fight was lost decades ago when it comes to tech and nothing indicates that the tide is turning there.

[loveparade]

> Ok but I do understand it, I also understand how cool the concept of the blockchain is _but_ real application of the blockchain outside of crypto is practically non-existent or could be better served by not using a blockchain.

I don't disagree with you here, I think the by far biggest use case is money/currency. I'm just commenting on how people here hate on anything related to crypto without any understanding.

> As for snarky comments about “I thought crypto was decentralized”. Yes it’s snarky but it’s a totally valid criticism.

I disagree here. It's like saying "SMTP sucks because I got scammed by an email from a Nigerian prince" - The criticism that wallets are hard to use is valid, but people on HN commenting on these threads don't even understand that. They just hate crypto for whatever reason without any understanding.